In Internet Protocol (IP) telephony, the path that the audio packets travel between endpoints generally varies. IP and switched Ethernet networks deliberately switch traffic onto specific routes, oftentimes making it difficult to use traditional passive tap techniques to record the telephony traffic. Generally speaking, as passive tap techniques access the packets somewhere between endpoints, along the route of the phone call, a passive tap has difficulty in that the data can be broken up into discrete packets, which may traverse different paths to reach the desired destination. As encryption of IP traffic becomes more widespread, passive tapping techniques become even more problematic.
Additionally, while some approaches have been implemented that use the duplication of media streams, these current techniques of creating exact (or almost exact) copies of the streams is not without drawbacks. More specifically, current techniques often require additional network capacity to facilitate communication of the duplicate streams. Additionally, the bandwidth utilized between the communications device and the recording device is often twice the bandwidth of the original call. Another drawback of the current techniques is that the packets sent to the recorder are often sent in a very inefficient manner, as echo and jitter reduction techniques are utilized, as in the original call. Further, the compression scheme in many current techniques is chosen on the basis of the network bandwidth and available bandwidth taken by the call, without regard to the path between the communications device and the recording device.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.